I give the floor to my husband Thomas Finn READ IT!👇🏽
There was another number I couldn't get to lie still, when I started sitting and looking at it yesterday.
Just try to follow along here.
Iran's regime killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in a matter of weeks at the start of the year. Not in a war. Not in chaos. But systematically, street by street, while the Western European world looked somewhere else.
The strange thing is not that it happened. Because the Iranian clerical regime has been carrying out this kind of murderous manoeuvre ever since it slaughtered, also in the tens of thousands, the left wing that helped it to power back in 1979.
No, the strange thing is how quiet it was.
There were no demonstrations through European capitals filled with young, inflamed university students, no occupied universities, no left wing that one would otherwise imagine would be the angriest about the betrayal of their class comrades - no celebrities suddenly finding their moral voice and pumping out videos in an endless stream.
One might perhaps call it an exception. Brush it aside and say - Well, it is far away too. There is plenty to worry about here.
But then you look at Congo, where the wars have cost more than five million people their lives - the deadliest conflict the world has seen since the Second World War - and you find the same silence.
Then you turn and look at Sudan, where mass rape, famine and ethnic cleansing are unfolding right now, and you find the same silence. Again.
Yemen, Syria, Nigeria - Christians and civilians wiped out in the tens of thousands, and still the same absence of everything we otherwise call conscience.
So the silence is not a hole in the pattern. The silence IS the pattern.
Because there is one conflict where the outrage never sleeps. One conflict with permanent demonstrations, permanent headlines, a permanent moral state of emergency.
The one where the Jewish state is involved.
This is not a feeling. It can be counted. In 2023, the UN General Assembly passed fourteen condemnations of Israel - and seven of the rest of the world. Combined.
Sudan got none.
And then you are left with the question the whole pattern points to. If the compassion were genuine, why does it need a particular adversary in order to wake up?
What we are seeing is not humanism. It is a moral hierarchy that decides whose dead count and whose dead are background noise.
And then notice the thing almost no one says out loud -
In most of those conflicts, both the executioners and the dead are Muslims. Iranian demonstrators. Sudanese families. Yemeni children. So if the outrage really were about Muslim lives, the streets would have been in flames long ago. But Muslim dead apparently only count when Israel can be held responsible. So it is not solidarity with Muslims either. It is only something that resembles it.
Genuine care for human life does not need Jews in the picture in order to be activated.
If your outrage only shows up when it can be aimed at Israel, it was never about the victims.
All lives matter. Jewish ones too. Christian ones too.
And an outrage that only wakes up when it can spot a Jew has an older name than humanism.
❤️🔥🪽Thomas Finn